Words

I've always been full of words. Whether drinking them in or spilling them out, I'm full to bursting with words. If I ever make a self portait, it will be a simple body outline filled by a word cloud. I was an early reader, an early writer. I began keeping journals at the age of ten, and keep them still. Through junior high school and high school and well into college I filled page after page of long yellow legal pads with fiction - an affectation I think I picked up after reading Sophie's Choice at a precociously young age - but oddly chose to keep my poetry in three ring binders. I have some of this juvenalia still, that which I thought was "worth saving"; I had to part with much of it - or, at the time, I thought I had to part with it - when my brother and I sold our childhood home.

I have whole conversations with Small Boy - given that he has a vocabulary of three words these are very one sided conversations mind you, but they are conversations nonetheless. Even just walking around town with him in the stroller I find it impossible to ignore him for long. He makes a sound and I make it back, and he makes a hand gesture and then I say something and before I know it I'm telling him about the mountains or where we're going that day. I've always suspected I have an inordinantly verbal relationship with Small Boy, at least compared to the Swiss mothers I see around town.

Today we went to a playgroup. There were four children, four mothers: me, two Swiss women, and a Russian woman. My English floated around the room and popped like soap bubbles. I must have said ten words to Small Boy for every one spoken by somebody else. Maybe I just speak more loudly; I'm certainly not self-conscious in my goofiness around the Small Boy. Whenever he climbed up the slide - and he spent a great deal of time climbing up the slide - I would cheer "today the slide, tomorrow...the Eiger!" I called him my little Jon Krakauer, my Reinhold Messner. I babbled away for 50 minutes as Small Boy clambered up the slide, pulled himself up on blocks, played with balls, crawled away from me. Whatever he is doing, I shower him with words.

He, in turn, makes me get down on the floor and speak with my body. I crawl after him, I bounce balls in front of him, I toss him in the air, I drag him around the house in a suped-up high horse power laundry basket. He pulls me out of my head and into my body. He's a physical boy - he likes when I spin around dancing with him, when I crawl after him, he giggles when I herd him like a sheep dog - and that's good for me. He makes me do these things. He makes me think less. I may never talk less, but a couple of hours a day I think less as I take the world on his terms, and for now his terms are pull me! dance with me! airplane me!

My self portrait will always be a body outline filled with words, but the body will be in motion.